


hang on past the last exit

by arbitrarily



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Content, F/M, Post-Season/Series 02, Resurrection, Soul-Searching, Underworld
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26581138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: If she has to, she’ll drag him back to the world of the living herself.
Relationships: Laura Moon/Mad Sweeney
Comments: 6
Kudos: 74
Collections: Trick or Treat Exchange 2020





	hang on past the last exit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Miss_M](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/gifts).



> Title from "No Children" by The Mountain Goats, because I couldn't resist.
> 
> Happy Trick or Treat!

Laura hauls his body down the interstate until a cop tries to stop her.

She waves the cop off, Sweeney’s body draped heavily over her left shoulder. He’s tall enough that bent like this his boots brush against her knees and his face along the back of her thigh. “Yeah, no, thanks, keep it moving, not interested.”

“Ma’am,” the cop says, and goddamnit, he’s parked his car on the shoulder. He’s getting out, footsteps crunching over the gravel towards her. He’s already reaching for his sidearm.

“I really don’t have the fucking time for this!” she shouts. She doesn’t stop walking. In truth, she doesn’t know where she’s going, but jail is certainly not on the fucking list of potential destinations. Neither is the morgue.

She briefly considers running but she worries that much exertion might be the last thing her own very much so dead body can take and she’ll wind up leaving pieces and parts of herself along the road. She shifts first her own weight and then Sweeney's. He really is a very heavy useless sack of shit.

“I’ll shoot! Ma’am! I will!”

“Ugh, go ahead and try. I’m all formaldehyde anyway.”

The gun doesn’t fire though, and when Laura looks over her shoulder she finds the cop scurrying back to his car, most likely definitely radioing for back-up. “Son of a fucking bitch,” she mutters under her breath (that is, if she had any left; you know how many overused common figures of speech no longer apply to her? It’s fucking annoying, is what it is.) She unceremoniously deposits Sweeney in the overgrown grass where the land along the highway flattens out. Grimacing, bracing herself, she heads towards the cop car. She rolls her neck, flexes her left shoulder. The coin is still in her, rattling around somewhere between gullet and guts. All that’s to say, it’s easy enough to shove the car over the guardrail and into the waiting ravine.

Exhausted, over-taxed, pissed as all hell, she drags herself back to where she left Sweeney. Where she left his body. Laid out in the grass, he looks like what he is: dead. Totally super dead. She nudges at his body with the toe of her boot all the same; nothing happens. She does it again anyway.

Back at the funeral home, Laura had stared down at the mark he had left on the floor. All that blood, still wet and glistening. A deep red, violently human in a way she had never once thought of him. Standing there, she had pressed the toe of her boot against the furthest edge of the spreading puddle. She couldn't tell you why then and she still can’t bring herself to articulate a reason. All she knows is that it was as if touching it proved something so terrible as mortality. No; that wasn’t what she wanted to prove. She had leaned down. She pressed her finger into his blood and the tip of it stained dark. She slipped it in her mouth and tasted. It tasted the same as when she bit the inside of her own cheek, before. When she was alive, too.

Now, she gnaws at the ragged fingernail of the same bloodstained finger. His death gnaws at her similarly. A familiar buzz of flies flits about her that she doesn’t bother to shoo. She drops her hand, wraps her arms tightly around herself. Tight enough she might burst at the seams and end this for once and for all.

She glances over her shoulder, back out at the highway. It’s quiet, not even birds in the trees. No one’s coming. “I have to do everything my-fucking-self,” she grumbles. She drops down to her knees beside him. Fuck, but he really does look dead. Dead-dead. Deader than her. Dead enough he should be in the ground, dead without hope. Six feet under, no miracles here _dead_.

Laura tilts her head back and she looks up at the sky. Cloudy and ugly, gray. She looks back down at him. She’s so tired and dead and tired of being dead. Without thinking, she sketches her fingers over his face. No; that’s not true. _Take me to him_ , that’s what she thinks, it's what she asks, silent and stupidly earnest in a way she does not think she has ever asked for anything, neither in life nor in death. _Take me to Mad Sweeney_. Under a breath she does not breathe, she says his name.

And despite her track record, Laura discovers something surprising: sometimes, her prayers can be answered.

Much like anything else she has encountered in death, the Underworld is not what she expected. To be fair, Laura doesn’t know what she expected exactly. Maybe Heaven, harps and clouds, angels and bells, or maybe she thought she’d find Hell instead—fire, brimstone, horned and horny devils, some real dire art museum worthy shit. There was a quieter part of her that supposed maybe what waited on the other side was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It would be the inside of her hot tub in her backyard, Eagle Point, Indiana, hidden beneath the nylon cover as she inhaled pyrethroids and DEET, deep and not nearly fulfilling. That was a form of nothing, too.

Instead, she’s met with a dark stretch of rain-slick street, like something out of a pulp detective novel or an old black-and-white movie, Humphrey Bogart waiting around one of these corners. It’s grimy, seedy; neon light glimmers off wet asphalt and Laura breathes in the permeating stink not of sulfur but cigarette smoke. She can do that down here—breathe, or, well, pretend at it far better than above. Enough that she doesn’t actively miss it. She steps forward, directly into a waiting puddle that soaks her feet. “Ugh.” She can’t help but think back to where she had first been taken, the scale, the feather, all that emptiness surrounding them. The memory is as unreliable and shaky as a dream. She can remember enough though; it was nothing like this.

With something like purpose or destiny or any other fancy word people wrap around confidence to give it greater meaning, Laura enters the first bar she encounters, down at the end of the dark street, the red OPEN sign flickering in invitation. And much unlike her reaction to her current environment, she’s not surprised at all to find Sweeney inside, nursing a pint. The surprising part is how he looks. He’s in full Celtic warrior get-up, kilt and all, the muscles of his bared arms and shoulders flexing and rippling as he raises a pint to his mouth.

“Jesus,” she mutters, despite herself. Any relief at seeing him again— _not_ that she is relieved, not that she ever would be, begging your fucking pardon—is lost in the distraction of seeing him like this. He looks like a porno Braveheart, or an ad for a particularly masculine brand of stout. She will never, alive or dead, tell him that.

Hands bracketed on her hips, she approaches him. “So, you get a costume change post-mortem, huh?”

The rim of his glass obscures the better part of his mouth, but he lifts first his eyes to hers and then his eyebrows towards his hairline.

“Not a moment’s peace I get, do I? Not even in death.” Sweeney settles his empty pint down after a lusty swig and a swipe at his wet mouth. He pointedly looks her up and down. “Though looks like I’m not the only one in my finer duds, now am I?”

Laura frowns before she glances down at himself. It didn’t occur to her before, that she could be different, too. Both time and self-awareness operate funny down in here, immaterial until reminded. Strangely, she is dressed for work at the casino. A bowtie sits slightly crooked around her throat and she runs her hands first flat down the front of a black and gold patterned vest then up to her hair, pushed back almost neatly off her face. When she looks up, she catches her reflection in the dirty mirror behind the bar. She looks, well, like her best self (if such a thing ever existed.) No maggots, no mortuary pallor. There’s a pink flush to her cheeks, her lips; she’s alive, save for her presence in the Underworld. She raises a hand to her face again, distracted. There’s a lure and a pull here, to sink into this, into herself. To die and stay dead.

“Barkeep,” Sweeney says beside her, jolting her back. He snaps his fingers. “Get the wench a glass.”

She takes a seat next to him. She idly wonders if she could’ve been here the whole time, if she had just agreed to accept her death. It’s not that bad. Nothing worse than what she endured alive. She can see herself getting as uncomfortably bored here as she did in Eagle Point. Next to her, Sweeney is eyeing her like he has an idea of what she’s thinking, and fuck him for that.

“It’s not so bad, yeah?” he says, proving the point.

“Being dead? Yeah, no, I’m gonna say it fucking sucks.”

“Liar. You love it. Let you off the hook, didn’t it? Do as you wish, you’re already dead.” He sighs as he swallows. “‘sides, take a look at yourself there, darling. Wouldn’t go so far as to describe a walking cadaver such as yourself good as new, but—no flies, eh?” It’s an understatement, but she refuses to give him even that much.

She turns over to look at him, legs swinging, too short for the barstool. She tries in vain to dredge up an ounce of that flirtatious mojo that always worked on Shadow. She cocks her head. “We have to go back, you know.”

“Nope. Don’t gotta do shit. I’m dead. Killed by your man, nonetheless. I have myself an eternity laid out here for myself, and I rather like it. Or, should say, I did. I liked it, present company excluded.”

She leans in a little closer. She never tried this angle on for size with him. It was always antagonism, full-throated and full throttle. She liked it that way—no performance required, only herself. Maybe he liked that too, just a little, because he cuts her off at the pass.

“Look at you, batting your eyelashes like there’s something more worth getting out me. You think you haven’t taken enough from me yet?” She doesn’t say anything, yet she can feel her mouth sinking into a pout. Sweeney’s not done. “You were wearing that, y’know. The first time I saw you.” Laura frowns. “At that casino of yours. I took a seat at one of the tables there and I watched you. Got to know my quarry, as any decent hunter would do.” He drains the rest of this pint too, settles it down gently rather than slamming it against the bar top. “Never seen a more miserable cunt in all my days,” but he says it as if pleased, as if that is exactly how he hoped to find her. That if he has to like her and he has to like her best, it’s as that: her very worst self. A miserable cunt.

Laura pushes the comment away, the accompanying rush of unwanted warmth, itchy and wrong under her dead flesh. “So, you spied on me? Before you killed me?”

All he does is shrug. “Wouldn’t want to go killing the wrong lass, now would I?”

She ignores that. Laura has never really bothered with introspection, neither alive or dead. Whenever she went searching inside herself, she always came up empty. So, in turn, she always has gone after what she wants, unevaluated and instinctual. This isn’t any different.

“Come back with me,” she says.

“Nope.”

“Come on. Don’t you wanna…” she waves her hand, tries to think of something, anything, a dead god like Mad Sweeney might be tempted by. “…get your revenge? On Wednesday?”

“That’s your best you’re playing with there? Trying to lure me out with Grimnir? Not even an A for effort for that one. Besides, I’m curious now—tell me how the sweet bloody fuck do you see the two of us breaking out of here? You think Hades’ll let a get as good as me just waltz out the back exit? You got another think coming.”

She ignores him still, the Hades namedrop in particular. “I’ll give you back your fucking coin.” She hears herself say it, and immediately, she wants to take it back.

Sweeney stills beside her. He looks down at her, sidelong, his next drink already refilled and raised, dripping down the side of the glass. “You shouldn’t go saying things you don’t fucking mean, Dead Wife. Someone just might take you up on it.”

Laura juts her chin out. “I mean it,” she says. And she supposes she does, as much as she ever means anything else.

“Why—” he starts. Sweeney stops; he shakes his head, a private smile pulling at his mouth. “I’ll tell you what—you convince our good man Hades to flip us back up earth-side, and I’ll take your wager. I’ll be having my coin back.”

Laura extends her hand. How hard can it be? “Deal.”

Hades sits in the backroom of what looks like any bar you could find in the worst part of Boston. He’s dressed as a slick gangster would, or at least one interested in being typecast as one: sharp suit, shined shoes, black sunglasses obscuring his eyes. A card game is in mid-play; he smokes a stogie, a gleaming collection of black poker chips neatly stacked before him. The king of the fucking Underworld. The sort of man uninterested in parting with what’s his. Shit.

It takes a beat before his focus is persuaded away from the cards in his hand. Hades eyes flicker over her. He nods his head in Sweeney’s direction. “You hooked yourself a dead one, boy. One of mine.” He fixes his attention back on her. “How’d you wriggle out”

Laura scowls. “Yeah, I’m no one’s.”

“Yeah?” Amusement is bright in his tone, voice thick and gravel-rough. Hades places his cards down on the worn green felt. Three kings. “Prove it.”

Laura’s not really interested in something as fruitless as trying to prove a negative, so she doesn’t try. Instead, she says, “You’re gonna need to let us go. Grimnir’s waging war and I gotta bring this guy up to stop him.”

Hades laughs. It’s not the worst thing she’s ever heard, but it’s far from the best. “Now why would I want to stop Grimnir from his game? Let him fight his war. Win or lose, business down here? It’ll be booming, baby. Not an empty seat in the house.” He takes the deck of cards in his hands and begins to shuffle, lightning quick. “Total annihilation, the world’s population under my care and keeping. You tell me: what’s not to love?”

Laura tries to think fast. She can all but feel Sweeney’s smirk, no need to look to him for confirmation. “Okay, sure. But. Who’ll be left to fear you? Who’s gonna worship you?” She knows the rules well enough by now: a god’s power only persists so long as there’s someone alive to know them. To pray to them. To say their names aloud and mean it. “The dead pray to no one,” she lies. “I should fucking know.”

Hades stills, considering. Laura doesn’t move a muscle. For once, she waits. He shuffles the deck once more.

“Your girl’s got a point, Sweeney.”

He scoffs. “Not mine. Not by a long shot.” She glances over to him. Sweeney is reclined back against the wall, his arms folded. “And by the way, do I get a say in my own goddamn fate here, or?”

“No,” Laura and Hades say simultaneously.

“I don’t do any favors,” Hades says then, directed to her. “Don’t mistake this for one.” He fans the cards in his hand. “Go on then,” he says. “Pick one.” She does.

They’re spat out of the Underworld, back to where Laura started. She returns to herself, still on her knees, Sweeney still flat on his back before her. A semi shrieks by. She startles then slumps over onto her side, eyes blinking fast against the sharpness even the overcast sky has now, overwhelmed, yet, strangely, at the same time, not. A remove remains, between herself and the world. She’s alive, she supposes. Alive, not dead. But she feels dulled and stupid, empty.

Sick.

She starts to retch on cue, a deep, hoarse hacking noise torn from her. Her chest heaves and she can feel something hot, too hot, unbearable, molten and burning, rise up her chest beneath her ribs. She shudders, and then, his coin spits out of her mouth as if she’s little more than a broken vending machine.

“Ugh,” she manages to say. A line of fire still burns down her throat to her chest. She rubs at her mouth with the back of her hand.

She pants for breath, and it's as she realizes that breathing is a thing she does again, her lungs up to the task, Sweeney does the same thing. Laid before her, he sucks in a harsh breath. It inflates his chest, his back arching away from the earth, power and strength in the clench and release of his muscles. He flops back down into the dead grass and his eyes flicker open. “Back again,” he mutters, more to himself than to her.

Sweeney slowly levers himself up onto his elbows. He still has that slightly slack look on his face, better befitting the recently lobotomized or the tail-end of a bender. Or the dead.

He lunges over, jerky yet quick, his body uncoordinated but determined. “Guess you won’t be needing this now then, will you?” He reaches and he covers her hand with his. His fingers are warm and her own tingle. He takes the coin from her, uncaring that it just very much so came from inside her. “And my luck is my own, yet again.” He says it nearly rueful rather than relieved. He flicks the coin between his fingers. A frown deepens his face, the coin still caught between his fingers. He groans. “That filthy, worms-for-brains son of a bitch.”

“Uh, excuse me?” Laura pulls herself up to her feet, absently dusting off her dirty dress. “Way to be grateful, asshole. What? You want to make your precious coin a timeshare sort of thing? Six months with you, six with me, you can bitch to your self-righteous glory half the year it’s jammed down my throat.”

“Not what I imagine down your throat, love,” he says. It’s aggressively sexual and the only thing she can do is laugh, the sound of it cruel and mocking, as she ignores the empty distraction to his own tone. Empty distraction—that’s a good term for it. She feels that, too. It’s as if they are diminished versions of themselves, back here with the living. Alive, but not. The car’s still running but the tank’s empty. Because she can feel it: there is a hollowed-out emptiness in her, something vital missing and gone. Her hand drifts of its own accord to her chest. The pain is gone, but she can almost feel the faint burn of where the coin rested, nestled inside her.

Sweeney steps towards the road. “Fucking Hades,” he finally sighs. “Sends a man into battle without his soul.”

She should’ve asked for the fine print. Live and learn. Turns out, per Sweeney’s spitting mad explanation, they exchanged their souls for passage out of the Underworld.

And a byproduct of that? Sweeney can’t reach his hoard. “If I want what’s mine back—and you'd do well to believe me, I do—I gotta start with the soul. Reclaim it, and what’s mine is mine again.”

“Okay, so, like. Who do we see about that?” Laura says. So far, since this whole ridiculous life-after-death adventure began for her in the Eagle Point cemetery, at every demented bend in the road, there has always been some god or demigod to seek out to try to fix this.

Sweeney looks at her like she’s both crazy and stupid. “A man gets only the one soul. Counts for the gods as well as the mere mortal. Only you who lost it can be the one to find it.”

Laura frowns. “How’s that now?”

“I gotta find it on my lonesome.” He glances down at her. “And same goes for you.”

She rolls her eyes. In truth, Laura’s suspects she herself never had a soul. It would explain a lot. Her lack of direction, her perpetual unhappiness. The handful of accusations she has blithely received throughout her life: selfish, cruel, heartless. Soulless.

Before she can ask him what happens if you never had one to lose, Sweeney turns on his heel and starts to head up the road. The war Wednesday has long been itching to start has clearly already begun. She doesn’t know how she knows that, but she does. She can feel it, as if the atmosphere has been tuned to the wrong frequency. A buzzing travels over her skin and there is a crackle to the air, as if at any moment the sky itself might split in turn, rent in two by a fork of lightning.

She catches up to Sweeney quickly, running against his long-legged pace. “Hey!” She grabs him by the wrist and pulls. Despite his size, he jerks back in her grasp. Her grip on his wrist is brutally tight and as she squeezes she can feel the bone beneath his skin bow and threaten to crack. Well. Looks like despite the retched-up coin, her new lease on life, and a lost soul she hasn’t forfeited any of the super-strength gifted upon her first resurrection. She expects Sweeney to yowl or at least rear back from her. Instead, all he does is hiss through his teeth and take it.

Laura releases him. He rolls his wrist and flexes his fingers. “Fucking hell, woman.”

She shrugs. “So, what the fuck’s the plan here? You wander far and wide enough and lo and behold you find your soul? Because that’s stupid.”

Sweeney starts to walk again; she half-jogs to keep up. “You can find anything in America, love. Apple pie and baseball, insider training, organized crime. Wedding chapels with Elvis the king himself waiting inside to marry you off to your intended. Souls? Why the fuck not.”

“You think fucking brings them back?” Laura is laid out on the stained and dirty comforter draped over one of two beds in Room 17 at the Lincoln Lodge Motel, smack dab in the middle of the Rust Belt. “Souls, I mean.”

Sweeney yawns. They walked all day and into the night. Just as the sun dipped down to the west behind them, at the crest of the next hill an off-ramp waited and with it one lone motel. Sweeney had his coin back, and with it, his luck.

The bed dips and creaks as Sweeney settles down on the other side of it. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.” He sighs. “Bad news for you then, love. Doesn’t work like that. You don’t find it, you _can’t_ find it, in anybody else. Trust, many have tried. A great many have tried.”

Laura doesn't say anything. Her silence must say something to him, because it spurs him into action. He places his hand deliberately on her bare leg, the width of his palm and the reach of his fingers nearly covering her shin completely. It makes every part of her perk up at attention, either to bolt or to fight or maybe something worse. He moves higher. He touches his fingers to her breastbone. He presses as if bequeathing something both personal and holy, seeking an absence to fill. She fights the urge to recoil from him, worse, grab him and force him bodily and fully against her.

"Though, I must confess," he says, low, quiet enough to ignore if she wanted. He taps her chest again. "You never struck me as the cowardly sort to seek excuses for the things you want to be doing."

He isn't wrong; she isn’t.

So as if on a dare, she pushes him back and she sits up. She gets up on her knees. Just as quickly, she leans over him and plants her mouth against his. It’s the first time she’s kissed him, the first time she’s kissed anyone but Shadow since dying. It feels very human and normal, kissing. He may be a god or a leprechaun or a king or dead, but he kisses like any other man intent on conquering a woman, even if only for a night.

Her lips already feel tender, buzzing. It's overwhelming and inarguable, the same thing as proof. Proof of what, she doesn’t know. It had felt so real when they were with the Baron—and it was real, she’s certain of that—but the actual physicality, the awareness, his flesh on hers, is something else entirely.

Sweeney tips his head back. Her kneecap jams into the muscle of his thigh, her hand curled like the talons of a bird of prey tight into his shoulder. “I’m not your Shadow Moon,” he says. “It won’t be me who makes your heart beat.”

Laura rolls her eyes. “Duh,” is all she says before she pushes him back into the mattress. The springs squeak.

After, Sweeney stretches out across most of the bed, Laura slung belly-down beside him. No part of them touches each other; she refuses to let him hold her.

“You should’ve left me dead, y’know. You shoulda respected a man’s wishes.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she mutters into the dingy and definitely disgusting comforter. She lifts her head. She can still taste his mouth in hers. She drags her body onto his, his thigh slotted between hers. She’s tired, but when has that ever stopped her from wanting more? “Fuck me again,” she says.

They drive east to New York. For reasons that most likely defy sense, logic, or her patience, Sweeney believes that is where he will find his soul.

Laura is behind the wheel, Sweeney too big for both the passenger seat and the car itself. His luck has mostly held; they stole a Miata.

“Shall we talk about it then?” Laura startles. She thought he was asleep.

“No. Fucking never, I’m thinking.” She flicks the cigarette butt out the window. She’s already working hard to ruin the fresh set of lungs she was graced with post-resurrection. In fact, she’s already gone and broken in plenty of her body. She wonders if she was technically a virgin again last night before she let him in between her legs. She aches like she was one, but then, she saw the size of him. The ache’s a given. “Be an adult. We fucked—that doesn’t mean we have to talk about it.”

She catches his smug, shit-eating grin before she turns her attention back to the empty road.

“I wasn’t talking about the lovemaking, now was I?” Laura say nothing beyond an emphatic, “ _ugh_ ,” at the word _lovemaking_. Sweeney’s voice gentles, and that’s even worse than anything he might actually say. “You came for me. You wouldn’t let the dead rest.”

Laura’s fingers curl tighter around the steering wheel. The leather creaks and threatens to tear beneath her crushing grip. “Chill out, Lucky Charms. It wasn’t anything personal.”

“You came for me,” he says again. As gentle as how he tried to hold her the night before, tender and dangerous.

“Fuck you,” but she says it the same as him. “Let me drive.”

They get to New York. Queens, Calvary Cemetery. Rows and rows of stones, generations of the dead beneath their feet.

Laura raises a hand to shield her eyes as she looks out towards the city. “I still don’t get what we’re doing here.”

“Show a little respect. This right here?” He points in the same general direction she had been looking—towards the city, the water. His mouth pulls with a contentedness she doesn't think is fair. “This is where my soul first entered America. Where it entered me.”

“This is boring,” Laura says.

He snorts. “It’s fucking history, is what it is.”

“Boring.”

She should have known better. All that does is earn her a lecture on why the gods find themselves in their current predicament—no faith, no reverence in the more recent generations of this country. They worship the wrong things.

“Oh my god, old man, give it a rest.” For all their godly whining, none of them seem all that observant. Laura doesn’t know what greater act of worship there is than getting down on your knees in the dirt and pressing your hands into flesh, cold and unyielding and gone, and making noises she won’t ever own up to, needful and weak and sad, sad with purpose. She had been so used to that directionless sadness that marked her entire life, but to feel sad for something specific, for _someone_ , to grieve, that hurt in a way she had hoped herself incapable of feeling. Worship was going down beneath the earth, tunneling through until she found where she wasn’t wanted and forced entry. She brought him back. That’s worship. That’s—

She frowns. When she looks up, Sweeney is watching her. That same searching expression he granted the city in the distance is now cast down at her. As she watches him in turn, his face softens—bit by bit and then all at once.

"Did you find your soul, or what?" she snaps, weakly defensive. She crosses her arms over her chest. "Ten bucks says you're still as empty as me, pal."

“Come here,” he says. "Let me prove how fucking wrong you are." Against her better judgment, she does.

He wraps her in his arms. Her own loop first loose and then tight, tighter, around his waist. "Close your eyes," he says, and she does that, too. She feels the world whirl around her, feels as much as hears his guttural shout, and she can’t help but let her eyes flutter open. She sees snatches of images that both mean nothing to her and things that frighten her to recognize. She sees gold.

Then, with a nauseating shiver, they’re back in the cemetery. Sweeney’s chest rises and falls against her cheek before he takes a stumbling step back from her. Laura opens her eyes. Clutched in his hand is a spear. Coins plink and scatter down from his grip. Sweeney's mouth cracks into a familiar grin. “Well. That’s a start,” he says.


End file.
